Follow by Email

About

Eperialism in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim

Rudyard Kipling’s Kim
easily falls into the category of colonial texts, which tried to portary an
Orientalized Orient during the colonial age. When Kim was published in
1901, the British Empire was still the most powerful empire in the world. The
Indian subcontinent was one of the most important parts of the empire, which
thousands of "Anglo-Indians," like Kipling himself, called home. As we go through Kim, we find that Kipling,
consciously or inconsciously acts as an imperialist agent. Imperialism was not
just the practice of the British Empire's acts of colonization of other lands
and people; imperialism was a philosophy that assumed the superiority of
British civilization and therefore the moral responsibility to bring their enlightened
ways to the "uncivilized" people of the world. This attitude was
taken especially towards nonwhite, non-Christian cultures in India, Asia,
Australia, and Africa.

In his “The pleasure of Imperialism” Edward Said says that Kim is “a master work of
imperialism…a rich and absolutely fascinating, but nevertheless profoundly
embarrassing novel.” He re-reads Kim from the post-colonial perspective and
says that many of the observations of Indian life presented in Kim as fact are
derogatory stereotypes, derived from orientalists' beliefs.

For example, Edward Said writes in his introduction to Kim:

Sihks are characterized as having a special 'love of money'; Hurree Babu
equates being a Bengali with being fearful; when he hides the packet taken from
the foreign agents.

These derogatory ethnic stereotypes are sharply contrasted with Kipling's
portrayals of the British and British culture as more advanced. For example,
when Lurgan Sahib attempts to hypnotize Kim, Kim recites the multiplication
tables he learned at English school to resist—sharply symbolizing Kipling's
belief in the advancement of British law over the superstitious ways of the
Asians. Such contrasts throughout Kim serve to support and justify the rule of
the "more capable" British over the Indian people.

Moreover, according to Edward Said the
portrayal of Kim as an orphaned quite a jungali boy, sensitive and friendly is
basically an image of Indian people. Culturally he was making them inferior. In
his view Indians were good natured, sensitive, friendly but were jungali and
uncultured. He conceives Indian society devoid of elements hostile to the
perpetualization of British rule, for it was on the basis of this presumptive
India that orientalists sought to build a permanent rule. The Kim (the protagonist
of his picturesque novel KIM) is a major contribution to this Orientalized
India of the Imagination. For example, “Kim would lie like oriental” or, bit
later, ” all hours of the twenty-four are alike to orientals”, or, when Kim
pays for train ticket with lama’s money he keeps one anna per ruppe for
himself, which, Kipling says, is “the immemorial commission of India” later
still Kipling refers to “the huckster instinct of the east” …..Kim’s ability to
sleep as the trains roar is an instance of “the oriental’s indifference to mere
noise”.

Kipling also develops between "native" and
"Sahib" conflicts with the unavoidable fact that the British are the
governing class, and the Indians are the governed. Kipling, however, presents
the imperialist presence in India as unquestionably positive. This is done most
effectively through the main plot of the novel — the endeavors of Indian and
British spies to protect the northern border of British India from the
encroachment of Russia, thus protecting the imperial interests of the British
Empire. It is especially significant that Indian spies are shown protecting
British interests. In this way, Kipling constructs an India in which the native
population supports the British Empire and thus presents Britain's imperialist
presence as a positive good.

The way Kipling assigns Kim the protagonist
and Babu Hurree Chander oppositional positions, for example, is also crucial to
the power relations within which the narrative operates. The relationship
between the colonizers and the natives was indeed a complex one, because there
was no tidy transfer of power between the two parties. There are connections
between the portrayal of Kim and the Babu but it becomes Kipling’s challenge to
assign these two characters distinct roles in his political narrative.

Kipling’s portrayal of Babu Hurree
Chander Mookerjee, a native employee in the British administration, is a
literary device used by Kipling to depict imperial authority. Indeed for
Kipling, who believed that it was India’s own destiny to be ruled by England,
it was imperative to stress the superiority of the white man, whose colonial
mission was to rule the dark and ‘inferior’ races. He does this by locating the
educated Hurree Babu in a position that is subordinate to Kim.

In terms of the social hierarchy enforced
by colonial order, therefore, Kim occupies the privileged position by belonging
to the ‘rulers’ whilst the Babu is his insignificant ‘other’. Despite this
notable fact, both characters are, undeniably, products of a colonial
upbringing in a colonized society. Thus, Kim develops as a superior in his role
of authority, whilst Babu Hurree Chander is his excluded opposite. In other
words, the Babu is Kim’s anti-self, to whom Rudyard Kipling assigns a negative
value in relation to Kim. In fact the relationship between the coloniser and
the colonized is a tense one, because of the intensity of the British colonial
period. This is Kipling’s major dilemma in the novel and a problem that he
attempts to overcome. The characters are merely there to highlight how the
British Empire affected those at grassroots level, the people most affected by
colonial authority. This is also why we see so many male relationships forged
throughout the novel. Colonies were essentially run by men and imperialism was
driven from a predominantly male perspective.

It is with this social and political
context in mind that exposes Kipling’s imperialist ideology as being nothing
more than a narrative strategy, to represent Kim’s authority over the native inhabitants
of the colony. However, Kipling was arguably an imperialist, and Kim embodies
attitudes towards British rule in India, which these days are wholly
unacceptable and unpalatable. Kipling believed it was right and proper for
Britain to ‘own’ India and rule its people, and so the possibility that this
position might indeed be questionable never seems to have crossed Kipling’s
mind. However, at the time that Kipling was writing, there was considerable
ferment of revolt amongst Indians against British rule but Kipling appears to
dismiss this at points in the novel when he could have acknowledged it. This is
particularly apparent in Chapter Three when he has an old soldier comment on
the Great Mutiny of 1857, dismissing it as mere “madness”:

In terms of explaining colonization and
imperialism, therefore, Kim is the ideal embodiment of the conflicting Indian
and English worlds. Interestingly, it appears that all of the events of the
Great Victorian Empire are inbred in Kim’s own character. As the British Empire
sought to discover and entrench its imperial authority in India, so too does
Kim seek to find a place in the country in which he was born. Thus, Kim faces
an ongoing struggle to create a new identity for himself. “Who is Kim?” “What
is Kim?” are two questions that Kim asks himself as the novel progresses. For
example on page 331 of Chapter 15, Kim poses exactly these questions from “his
soul”:

‘I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?” His
soul repeated it again and again.’

As in the words of Edward Said, “we have
been shown two entirely different worlds existing side by side, with neither
really understanding the other, and we have watched the oscillation of Kim, as
he passes to and fro between them.” As such, Kipling renders a vision of India
where intellectual, moral and political boundaries are less than equal. Indeed,
if Kipling believed, as he well argued, that East and West can never really
meet in the Indian colony, then in Kim he makes sure they do not.

Kipling’s emperialism becomes more evident if
we compare him with another victorian novelist Conrad. Unlike Conrad, Kipling
did not offer any negative assessment of the imperial project. On the contrary, for him it represented high
adventure. It was Europe's moral duty to
'enlighten' the non-white world. Kipling
believed in racial difference, that is, in European superiority and for him
British rule in India was a solid fact, beyond any challenge.

Thus, the Great Empire had a profound effect
on Rudyard Kipling’s literary creativity, especially in the creation of his
characters and the distinctive lives that they lead. As Said points out
Kipling's Kim embodies the absolute divisions between white and non white that
existed in India and elsewhere at a time when the dominantly white Christian
countries of Europe controlled approximately 85 percent of the world's surface.